The Higgs boson: What has God got to do with it?

(A scientist gestures in front of pictures of the first successful collisions at full power at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva March 30, 2010. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse )

“We don’t call it the ‘God particle’, it’s just the media that do that,” a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.

“Well, I am the from the media and I’m going to continue calling it that,” said the journalist – and continued to do so.

The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix.

“I hate that ‘God particle’ term,” said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN’s ATLAS team of so-called “Higgs hunters” – an epithet they do not reject.

“The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that,” she told Reuters at a news conference after her colleagues revealed growing evidence, albeit not yet proof, of the particle’s existence.

What the standard model in reality predicts is, that mass does not exist.

What if mass in reality does not exist at all?

Professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto John Moffat, was in direct communication with Einstein in his late life. John Moffat describes in his book “Reinventing Gravity”, how Einstein in the fifties attempted to construct a theory that unified gravity and Maxwells equations of electromagnetism.

If mass does not exist, or in some way is related to electromagnetism then gravity doesn’t exist either.

It really is spooky, but it seems like electromagnetism is the only existing property in the physical universe. The strong and the weak force has some very peculiar similarities to electromagnetism. The standard model shows that.

Einstein never found the relation. If he did he would have made headlines again.